My life partner, Caroline O’Reilly, died at the age of 71, is a fearless community activist and socialist.
When I first met her in the 1970s, Caroline was active in Southall, West London, helping to establish rock against racism and anti-Nazi coalitions, and was killed by police with her friend Blair Peach, and later moved to Hackney, East London, where she organized a poll tax against the polls. Caroline has been a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party since 1977 until her death and likes to interpret Rosa Luxemburg, “The revolutionary is the best fighter of reform.”
In 1985, she made a secret solidarity visit and worked in Johannesburg in 1990 with accountants who assisted the “Struggle Organization”. In 1998, I and I moved to South Africa permanently. Caroline is involved in the implementation of a government-funded community work program, which by 2012 had employed 93,000 employees in the most marginalized areas of the country.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Caroline played a key role in two of the most successful organizations to stand out from grassroots activities, with the Community Organization Working Group and #Paythegrant, both located in townships and informal settlements.
Born in Cork, she is the oldest of six children of bank official Frank O’Reilly and a housewife Anne. She attended school there and later went to schools in Carlo and Bondoland. She attended University College of Cork, where she participated in one of Ireland’s first women’s groups but moved to the UK at the end of the second year.
She worked at a canning factory in Lincolnshire and then at a bar in London, where she was a union representative by Allied banks since 1973. In order to develop herself intellectually, in 1990, she began studying information and communication in north London. Later, while working for Christian aid, she completed her Masters in Development Studies at the Institute of Oriental and African Studies.
During our 27 years in Caroline, South Africa, I lived in the Johannesburg suburbs of Brixton, where she was a member of the community forum. She is honored with the quilts made by community members before we return to London in 2024.
Caroline is adventure and brave. She stood violently, shot by soldiers from Belfast, breathlessly on the Kenya Hill, accused of being a Botswana elephant, a sudden snowstorm in the Kerngoers and Drakensberg Mountains, and was stained with me as a shapeshifter. She could be unconscious in one sentence, but it was fun and warm. She makes you laugh at yourself, but you never laugh at it, just thanks her for her advice, support, friendship and love.
She and her siblings Michael, Mary, Connor and Sally survived.
